Something Electric in Bellevue: The History of Sucker Punch

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How the Sony-owned studio behind Sly Cooper and Infamous came to be.

By Colin Moriarty

Sony owns a lot of studios, but it's fair to say that one of its rising stars is Sucker Punch Productions. Sony's been partnering with Sucker Punch for about 15 years, and it enjoyed working with the studio so much -- and was so floored by the games the development team there was producing -- that it opted to purchase it outright in 2011. It isn't a studio Sony-founded, nor is it one that's always worked as a PlayStation developer, but like other first party studios in Sony's stable -- think Naughty Dog or Media Molecule -- Sony identified what made them special and was smart enough to nail 'em down before they strayed too far.

This is the history of Sucker Punch, largely told through the words of seven long-time employees -- including three of the studio's founders -- as they remember it. I hope you enjoy it. -Colin Moriarty (September 12, 2014)

Sony and Microsoft have been arch-rivals going back to the days of Xbox-versus-PlayStation 2, a vicious commercial competition that only intensified during the Xbox 360-PlayStation 3 era, and one that persists now that we have PS4s and Xbox Ones in our living rooms. That's why it's so incredibly ironic , looking back at it, that Sucker Punch's founders all met while working at Microsoft. Their names are Brian Fleming, Chris Zimmerman, Bruce Oberg, Darrell Plank, Tom Saxton, and Cathy Saxton. Fleming, Zimmerman, and Oberg in particular are the three core founders and visionaries of the company that still work there today.

The three men began working at Microsoft in the late '80s, at a time when Microsoft was incredibly profitable and powerful, iterating on its MS-DOS and Windows operating systems -- not to mention its suite of programs -- but before it really began to rule the world with Windows 95. Interestingly, it was following that Windows 95 boom that the three friends, along with the other three co-founders, began to ponder whether it was time to move on.

"We were in the same group [at Microsoft], and then we kind of worked together off and on over the next 8 or 9 years," Zimmerman explained. "It started with me. I started getting disenchanted with my life at Microsoft and was thinking about doing something new." Zimmerman and Fleming went out one day to see one of the entries in the re-released Star Wars Trilogy, the Special Editions, which were released in the spring of 1997, when Zimmerman began to prod his friend about a possibly very different future.

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[I] kind of had this semi-rough idea -- I don't know how formed it was at that point -- of doing a game company, and luckily, Brian [Fleming] thought that that sounded interesting.

"'Hey, have you ever thought about doing something different?'" Zimmerman recalled asking. "[I] kind of had this semi-rough idea -- I don't know how formed it was at that point -- of doing a game company, and luckily, Brian [Fleming] thought that that sounded interesting." As for their other friend, Bruce? He had some experience with games, but it wasn't a leap that was necessarily logical for him to make, and he wouldn't join the company until Zimmerman and Fleming had already cut away to do their own thing.

"I had spent all my time playing in arcades in college," Oberg admitted. "I put so much money into Stargate and Defender... I'm pretty good at it, actually. But it was funny, because I'm just a little bit older than these guys, and so I never really hit the console stuff until basically the Nintendo 64 came out."

Intensifying the oddity that the studio was founded at Microsoft and would one day be owned by Sony was that Oberg's obsession with his Nintendo 64 was what got their collective minds ticking about moving into development in the first place. Oberg brought his N64 into work when it launched Stateside in the fall of 1996, and the three men would play its launch games -- Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings -- somewhat taken aback by how far gaming had come, especially for PC-minded folks like them.

Mario 64 was hugely inspirational to the founders of Sucker Punch.

"It was before any of us had gaming PCs, right?" Zimmerman asked, rhetorically. "I mean, I was playing games at that point, but it was all 2D stuff, Railroad Tycoon and whatever… So seeing this consumer bit of electronics that was actually doing 3D stuff was cool. I mean, I'd played Wolfenstein and Doom and all those games, but somehow it was different, you know? Mario was different."

Oberg and Fleming had similar experiences, playing in arcades as kids and later seguing to home computers like the famous Apple II. Pong and Adventure were some early forays for them. Fleming was so immersed in computer gaming as a kid, in fact, that he ran a BBS called The Realm of the Rogues (with a paltry peak baud speed of 1,200), and he later worked at Epyx, helping to port over and program California Games to Apple II, where he made between $10-$12 an hour writing Assembly.

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The difference between them and their peers who left to work for or found dotcoms, however, was their disinterest in dealing with venture capital and the general realities of running an actual business.

N64's predecessor, the SNES, was also formidable for Fleming, who fell in love with the likes of Star Fox and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past a few years before Oberg introduced the group to N64 ("it just completely changed my expectations of what things could be," Oberg later said of N64's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time). But there was more to the equation than mere games. The idea of creating a video game studio had gravity for the three men, to be sure, but they were also watching a lot of their colleagues leave Microsoft to join dotcoms during the original web boom. It seemed like doing something different -- something unconventional -- just might work.

The difference between them and their peers who left to work for or found dotcoms, however, was their disinterest in dealing with venture capital and the general realities of running an actual business. "We just want to build product," Zimmerman admitted. The three men were drawn to gaming because it seemed to be an industry that allowed them to focus on creation while letting other groups of people take care of extraneous – but still important – issues essential to their success. The notion of allying with a publisher seems unappealing to many developers today in a landscape littered with self-sufficient indies, but that line of thinking was unintuitive to many creative types in 1997. Brian Fleming elaborated more on this idea

"The idea of having a publisher was actually really appealing to us, because it meant that we didn't need to deal with marketing and sales and all the things that I just don't think are our strengths. We didn't want to do that part. And video games had this business model that let us focus on the technical and creative, and not focus on the stuff that was not our background. I mean, we were creators of things, not people who made our career selling things."